Streaming: MyFrenchFilmFestival puts auteurs at your fingertips
At a time when more and more traditional film festivals are catching up with streaming culture – or pointedly not doing so, as with last year’s Netflix-Cannes fracas – the annual online MyFrenchFilmFestival stands as something of a trailblazer. Now in its ninth year, this global showcase for French and French-speaking cinema was one of the first of its kind to bridge the exclusivity of the film festival model with the global accessibility of internet viewing.
In partnership with Curzon Home Cinema in the UK, from now until 18 February, serious film fans in multiple territories can sample fresh festival fare that may not be released by local distributors for months or years, if ever. As a teenage cinephile growing up in Johannesburg’s semi-arid arthouse climate, I’d have regarded MyFrenchFilmFestival as a kind of miracle.
Unlike streaming programmes set up by existing traditional festivals – including Venice, Locarno and Rotterdam, the latter set to unfold next week – MyFrenchFilmFestival exists entirely online, right down to its viewer-voted audience award. (A more illustrious jury is also appointed to give a flash of old-school prestige to these digital proceedings; last year, they nabbed Paolo Sorrentino to chair it.) For most people, the films alone should suffice. Mixing features and shorts, this year’s programme is a healthy snapshot of French cinema away from the more expected auteur A-list.
The 16-strong short film programme is entirely free to stream. Feature films can be watched on a modestly priced pay-per-view basis or, if you’re really planning to get stuck in, as part of a better-value festival pack. Given the low profile of some of the selections, a bit of chance-taking is part of the fun. You’ve nothing to lose, of course, with the shorts selection. It’s largely focused on new talent, though Chris Marker’s justly legendary 1962 sci-fi vision La Jetée is included as a kind of legacy pick. Its presence is unlikely to flatter even the best of the newbies, but its romantic shifting of time and space lends the lineup some guaranteed rapture.
Among the dozen selected features, drifting toward more familiar names offers mixed rewards. The festival’s one classic pick, from 1986, is a glorious one: Mauvais Sang, a mad, pulsating romantic fantasy by Holy Motors director Leos Carax, has aged as beautifully as its then milky-young star, Juliette Binoche. But from the contemporary offerings, the lurid, florid Marion Cotillard vehicle Angel Face is a surprising blot on the star’s copybook. Cast against type as a hot-mess single mum in a kind of Côte d’Azur spin on The Florida Project, she’s just compelling enough to make Vanessa Filho’s otherwise jumbled social-realist melodrama worthwhile for devotees.
If Angel Face had the benefit of a Cannes premiere last year, one of the lineup’s most compelling inclusions, Black Tide, flew oddly under the radar. As the first film in a decade from director Erick Zonca, the man behind The Dreamlife of Angels and the Tilda Swinton stunner Julia, you’d expect this black-hearted, atmosphere-saturated thriller to be a bigger deal. Starring a grandstanding Vincent Cassel as an alcoholic cop disintegrating while on the hunt for a missing teen, it’s a brashly pulpy genre ride in a way you wouldn’t have expected from Zonca’s subtler previous work.
Other selections include Gaspard at the Wedding, an endearingly eccentric dysfunctional family comedy, and French-Canadian newcomer Pascal Plante’s vibrant, punky love story Fake Tattoos, which gives an unlikely neon-flecked lick of romance to the Montreal teen scene. This year’s MyFrenchFilmFestival cheerfully mixes a mostly new guard with the old, all on the edge of the mainstream: not everything here will be quite so conveniently available in the future, so take advantage.
New to streaming and DVD this week
Crazy Rich Asians
(Warner Bros, 12)
It’s more notable as a cultural milestone – Hollywood’s first all-Asian blockbuster – than as a film in its own right, but this lavishly appointed romcom is a fun, feathery diversion.
A Simple Favour
(Lionsgate, 15)
Much the same goes for this supremely well-dressed trash trifle from Bridesmaids director Paul Feig: a Chabrol-lite bourgeois noir with Blake Lively on slinky form as a yummy mummy gone Awol.
The Children Act
(Entertainment One, 12)
Emma Thompson does much to prop up Richard Eyre’s fusty take on the Ian McEwan novel, but it’s one of those adaptations that calls the strength of the source material into question.
The Last Movie
(Powerhouse Films, 15)
Long unavailable in any format, Dennis Hopper’s exhilaratingly unhinged 1971 experiment gets an extravagant 4K restoration. Now, as then, it holds a shattered mirror to Hollywood movie-making.
Sawdust and Tinsel
(Sony, 12)
A glistening Criterion re-release for one of Ingmar Bergman’s less routinely celebrated early films, a wistful, carnival-is-over melodrama centred on an ageing ringmaster’s personal woes.
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